26
SIDNEY HOOK
only just war in history. But surely any reasonable grounds offered
for believing the war against Hitler just would apply to some other
wars, too.
If
it is admitted that resistance against Hitler and other
tyrants was justified why should resistance against Communism be
considered wicked, once we cease the macabre death mongering which
exaggerates all dangers beyond measure. Budapest was as bad as
Warsaw; the Soviet concentration camps hardly better than the Nazi
camps--for the millions who perished there. Is it the point that
those who fought against Hitler expected the free world to survive
while there can be no such expectation today? There is, as we have
seen, reason to doubt this. But even so,
if
those who died in the
struggle against Fascism could have foreseen that the survivors were
going to capitulate to a brutal despotism in order to enjoy whatever
life their tyrants permitted them in exchange for their freedom and
human dignity-why should they have fought? No one wants to be
vaporized. All of us tend to cling to life.
If,
however, fear of a nuclear
holocaust in consequence of resistance to aggression, justifies capitula–
tion, those who died no less horrible deaths resisting Hitler, Mussolini,
Franco and other dictators could very well ask: Why were
we
ex–
pected to die fighting evils
you
find perfectly tolerable to live under?
To respond to this with talk about the justice of the war against
Hitler and at the same time to urge capitulation to the Kremlin is
to mock the dead.
If
survival on any terms is the real desideratum
of those who talk this way, what possible difference can it make to
their position whether a war
is
just or unjust?
I conclude with a few observations which seem to me to be
warranted by our knowledge of history, psychology, and above
all
by our common sense. The Communists are not devils but fellow
mortals who believe that they are the chosen instruments of the
dialectic of history to bring salvation to all men on earth no matter
how many they kill in the process. They do
not
want war because
they believe they can triumph without one. And indeed, recent history
and the many fools in the West are on their side. They will never
initiate a war unless convinced in advance that they will win an easy
victory. They are unsure of the loyalty of their own people, since
they do not grant them freedom of choice, and are especially unsure
of the loyalty of the nations they hold captive. There will therefore
be no all-out war so long as the free world has the strength and the
